The great fervour with which the monastic revival was received, had been due, in part, to the awful miseries of France during the 10th century, and in part to an almost universal belief that the year 1000 A.D. would herald the second coming of Christ, and the end of the world; but, by the time that year had passed without the advent of any of the expected phenomena, the more clear-sighted, perceiving the immense possibilities which the religious revival shadowed forth, for the welfare of a people crushed beneath the harsh feudal laws of the time, saw therein an additional inducement to encourage monastic effort. Gratitude for preservation had also its effect. All omens were propitious for the rise of Cluny to great glory. In the year 1024, a lady of noble Burgundian family, knowing that the hour was come in which she should give birth to a child, and following the custom of the time, summoned a priest, who, by the sacrifice of the mass, should assure her a happy delivery. At the moment when, while consecrating the host, he was wrapt in fervent prayer, there appeared to him, shaping itself upon the golden bottom of the cup, a child's face radiant with a heavenly light. At the conclusion of the ceremony, he hastened to tell the mother what he had seen, and, finding the child already born, predicted that, God granting him life, the boy was chosen out for a great destiny, and would surely be found worthy, one day, to minister the cup in which his birth had been thus signalized. To the great joy of the mother, that hope was gloriously fulfilled; for the son born under such happy omens was Hugues, the greatest of the great abbots of Cluny, he, under whom the abbey, and, indeed, the whole church of Rome, was to establish an authority never before dreamed of in Christendom. Braving the anger of his father, Delmace, an ambitious and violent Seigneur, who would fain have seen his son don the knight's armour rather than the monk's cowl, Hugues, already ardently set upon a life of piety, obtained admission to the monastery of St. Marcel de Chalon, which he soon left, in order to place himself under the protection of Odilon, the then abbott of Cluny. This new father of the young Hugues was one of the best beloved of the abbotts of that monastery. Lacking the austerity of his predecessor, Odon--the great reformer whose energies had given new life to the Benedictine order--Saint Odilon, this "dernier et le plus méprisable des frères de Cluny," as he styled himself, though short and thin in person, was, at the same time, robust and virile; a humble, grave, sympathetic, fatherly man, whose pale face could flush with anger, and his gentle voice become terrible in rebuke of wrong-doing; one whom the sins and sorrows of the living and the dead[74] touched to the heart, as attested by the many healings with which legend has credited his name.